A Song of Fire and Fire
by Thinker6
Summary: Taylor Hebert triggers with Burnscar's power. After a confrontation with a hero goes wrong, she must choose between her ideals and her new companions. Is Taylor destined for the Birdcage, or can she build a new life with the help of Canary and Lung?
1. Chapter 1

"The hell am I supposed to do?" I wanted to hit something, break something. Retaliate against the unfairness of the world. I clenched the strap of my bag in my right hand, ready to throw it against the wall of the bathroom, smash it to pieces.

No. Don't lose control. Losing control means losing control means losing control means...

I desperately fished in my pockets and pulled out my lighters. I flicked them on and jammed their lighted ends against my cheeks, letting the flames press against my skin. I felt myself calm down a fraction, my heart slowing down, my racing thoughts turning colder, calculating as my emotions detached ever so slightly from my everyday troubles.

I was still mad as hell. At the _fucking_ stupid girls who tried to _hurt_ me and _crush_ me every _fucking_ day for _no goddamn reason at all_. But when I used my power to its fullest, meditating in my room, I somehow wasn't bothered by that anger anymore.

I didn't have words to describe it. It sounded pretentious, but the best I could call it was a transcendant state of enlightenment. No regret, no guilt, no shame. No stupid second-guessing trying to convince myself that I was wrong to be mad at those bastards, that I was wrong to want to burn them to death from the inside out. My anger was just there, honest and pure and natural, a part of myself that I could accept like any other.

I still knew that I couldn't kill them, of course. But that wasn't an opinion forced on me from the outside, by the guilt, shame, and fear of murder that society had taught me. It was _my own choice_ to spare their lives, driven by the cold, hard logic of the situation. If I killed them then they'd call in the police, then the capes, then the big-name heroes from other cities. Escalation upon escalation until they called in someone strong enough to stop me. Then they'd kill me or send me to jail for the rest of my life.

It wasn't just my freedom. If I killed the bullies, I wouldn't be able to see my father anymore. He'd be disappointed in me, feel guilty, feel like he was a bad parent. He might even hate me. None of that mattered, of course, in this state I was detached from my emotional ties to my family. I wasn't moved at all by how he would feel. But the cold hard facts were that he provided for me, gave me a home, gave me a safe space to cool down and pull my self together after a hard day. If I went on a rampage and ran from the law, I'd have to find emotional support from whatever strangers I met as a fugitive. Fat chance. I'd go on more rampages, more escalation, until they tracked me down and killed me in the end.

I couldn't get the full benefit of my power here at school, of course. Starting an inferno was too dangerous - I could create flame from thin air, shape it any way I pleased, but if I set things on fire I didn't have any special power for putting them out. And every time I used my power in school, it got harder to resist the temptation the next time around. The lighters were enough, though. I raised them higher on my face, let the flames lick against my eyes, and slowly brought myself back to something approaching normality.

I would deal with this. I would-

Something struck me in the side, hard. I fell to the dirty floor of the bathroom, lighters skidding out of my hands.

Sophia stood above me. "Burning yourself in the face? Pretty creepy, Taylor. You should be glad I was here to save you from your fucked-up self-mutilation."

_That bitch_. She was still at it? Did she ever rest?

I held my breath. I didn't say a thing. I didn't move. If I moved an inch I wouldn't be able to stop myself, I would burn her. She deserved it, she deserved it a thousand times over, but if I took that step it would all be over.

"Self-harm is a response to stress, you know." said Sophia. "You look pretty stressed out to me. I wouldn't be surprised if you woke up tomorrow covered in brusies that were your own dumb fault."

She drew back her leg to kick me. I tensed in anticipation of the hit...but it never came. Sophia was looking at a light dancing behind me.

I didn't have to look to know what it was. I could feel it. One of the lighters had gotten jammed against my bag, stuck in the 'on' position, and now my bag was on fire.

It was then that I realized my mistake. I had used the flames as a stress relief, a form of meditation...but I had always meditated alone. The flames gave my anger a cold, honed edge and this was the first time I had ever given it a nearby target to strike.

Now, as I looked at Sophia standing above me, I tried to keep my impartiality. To weigh the pros and cons and see that I had to let myself take the hit, that if I burned her there would be no stopping until my future was filled with flame and ashes.

I tried and...I failed.

The feelings that were holding me back drained away. I didn't _want_ to take the hit. Why _should_ I want to take the hit? What kind of twisted society was I raised in that gave me fucked up thoughts like that? I didn't deserve to be kicked around like a toy, and this _bitch from hell_ and her _piece of shit_ friends sure as hell didn't deserve to lay single a fucking finger on me. Betraying me, breaking my stuff, stealing my work, pushing me and pushing me and no sign of ever stopping until they _ground me into the dirt like a worm, they were the ones who should be crushed into dust, I wasn't going to take it!_

No, I wouldn't take it. For once, just this one time, I was going to push back. And if that meant my future was filled with flames and ashes, I could almost believe I _welcomed_ it.

...  
...

"Hey. Hey. Are you awake?"

I felt gentle taps on my face, drops of water raining from the sky. I blinked, tried to move toward the voice, and found that I couldn't.

Oh, right. I was wet, soaked, buried up to my neck in containment foam. Five heat-sensitive water jets were mounted above me, ready to turn the drizzle into a high-pressure downpour at the slightest buildup of heat around my body. A metal grill on the floor recycled the water so they could run the jets indefinitely. More nozzles were mounted in the ceiling that would pump sedatives into the air at the first sign of trouble. The foam forced me into a cramped sitting position where I must have been stuck for hours as the PRT maximum-security van escorted me on my one-way trip to the Birdcage.

"I'm glad you're up." said the voice. "I never liked silence. Right now it's too solemn, like a funeral. I've got this feeling of, of dread in my gut for hours and I can't take my mind off it."

I blinked again, tried to focus on the voice to keep myself awake. My mouth felt raw and itchy, like it was stuffed with cotton. The voice was familiar from somewhere...ah. I forced my eyes open and saw a woman on the other side of the van, her mop of bright yellow hair and feathers peeking out under the leather straps of her restraint mask. Unlike me, she was dry.

"Hey," I managed, weakly. "I'm Taylor."

"Tailor? You're a fashion designer? I called myself Canary."

"No, no. Taylor, the name. And you're Paige Mcabee. Can I call you Paige?"

"Oh, you know me?" The woman smiled a bit beneath her mask. "Yes, go ahead, Taylor. You liked my music?"

"Never got to hear it, sorry. I followed your trial."

Her face fell.

"Hey, no. You got a raw deal. You're a good person, you didn't mean any harm. You don't deserve to be here."

"You..." Paige looked down. "You're the first person to say that to me. Ever since the trial. The way they all look at me, its like they stopped seeing me as a person. All they see is a monster."

"You're not a monster. You just made one little mistake. It's the same story for me. When we're kids they raise us like everyone else, tells us to believe in forgiveness and second chances. The two of us, we could have been good people, got respectable jobs, started families and raised kids. Then we get powers like ours, and suddenly we...we have to be perfect. We can't make any mistakes at all, because there's no such thing as a little mistake.

"I tried, I tried as hard as I could, and I still wasn't perfect enough to control my power. I ended up hurting a...a lot of people, when I didn't mean to at all, not at first. I understand why they have to put me away, they can't risk it happening again. I'm okay with that. But that doesn't change the fact that I didn't mean it. It was all a mistake.

"So listen, Paige, I understand what it's like. You did as good as anyone could have done with your power. You're a good person who just got a bad break."

Paige nodded, a hint of moisture appearing at the corners of her eyes. "Thank you. I, I...that means a lot to me. I don't know you, but you're...nice. Not like I expected. I believe you, that you're a good person, too." she managed a small smile. "Is it the same for him? They brought you in together."

I managed to turn my head partway to my right. A towering hulk of a man was under the pressure jets alongside me, the same restraint system but buried in twice as much foam. His eyes were half-open but he was watching us, moving his eyes back and forth to follow our conversation.

I didn't know whether to sob or laugh. "Lung? They put us in a van together?"

Lung made a deep sound in his throat, somewhere between a scoff and a growl. "They are prideful or foolish. Perhaps both."

Paige startled. She must not have heard him speak before, he must have spent the whole ride sulking.

I turned back to Paige. "No. That's Lung. He's a brute, as bad as they come. Trust me."

She shrank back, head pressed against the wall. "Um. Okay. If you two have a history, or...anything, you don't have to talk about it."

"No, it's fair. I like you, Paige. If we're going to be together in the Birdcage, I want to be your friend. I know your story so I'll tell you mine."

Paige nodded.

"My power is about fire. It's the opposite of yours, in a way. Your song manipulates people, but my power manipulates me. I can sense the fire around me, all the fire within half a mile. I can move inside the fire, teleport between the fires in my range. And I can make the fires grow, make more fire from my body, and craft it into shapes, anything I like. I can put on an entire puppet play with flames dancing in the air. It's beautiful, Paige, I'll show you when we get down there.

"And the problem is, the more fire that's around me, the more it _kills_ me, kills my emotions. Makes me act without feeling love, fear, guilt, remorse, regret, pain...I get cold and rational, or _almost_ rational. The only feeling left is this little bit of anger, when people get in my way, and this little bit of...joy, of amusement at using my power on the people around me.

"That's why I'm here, Paige. A girl picked a fight with me, she kept coming after me. I tried to burn her and she ran away. It turned out she was a cape, a 'hero'. She was fast so I had to make more and more fire to teleport and chase her.

"I only ever meant to hurt her a little bit, to scare her off. I didn't want to hurt anyone else. But more and more people kept getting in my way, policemen, heroes, whoever, so I burned them a little too, to make them stop bothering me. I finally cornered the girl and I started heating up the scenery, making a show so she'd know not to fuck with me again. Then Lung showed up and tried to kill me."

I turned to him. "It was my fault. Sorry Lung. You're a brute, a villain, but I shouldn't have been burning down buildings on your territory. Or anywhere, really. I wasn't in my right mind at the time."

Lung scoffed.

"Anyway, I fought him. I burned him pretty bad, down to a crisp even, but he kept regenerating and getting bigger and stronger. He tried to grab me but I was too fast for him, so he tried to burn me but that just gave me more places to teleport. And then...things kind of escalated.

"We went on for maybe twenty minutes, till Lung grew into this freaking firebreathing dragon with wings. We burned down a city block by the time the heroes finally decided to step in again and take us out. Well, that meant _more_ people getting in my way, so I fought the heroes, too. Somewhere along the line Lung and I realized that we couldn't hurt each other but the heroes could hurt both of us, so the heroes were the bigger threat. Lung blasted one of the guys who was putting out my flames, then I burned the guys who were attacking him, and then Lung and I went back to back to fight them off. We beat the heroes, easy. Then the villains came after us, Nazi skinheads and the rest, so we beat them too. By that time...seven or eight blocks on fire, I think. Then they brought in a bunch of heroes from out of town, so we beat them, and then they brought in even _more_ heroes and mechanical tinker dragon suits, and finally they brought in Eidolon and he kicked our asses in two minutes. _Fucking_ Eidolon and his _fucking bullshit_ Master powers."

Paige was looking a little pale. Oh. Right.

"...not that he was wrong to stop us or anything. Uh. I'm using my power a little bit right now, actually. If I let myself feel the regret for all of that stuff I'd be a useless wreck. I couldn't have finished my story for you. I would have broken down halfway through, crying out for Dad."

"I can tell." said Paige, quietly. "Your eyes are glowing."

"Yeah, that happens."

"And your voice sounds different. Cold."

"Yeah. You know, Paige, I spent a lot of time thinking about you when I was in containment. I hope you don't take this in the wrong way, but I was glad when I heard you lost your case. It meant I could have you with me in the Birdcage, we could be together."

"Uh." said Paige. She was giving me this creepy stare. "You, uh. I...I don't mean any offense, but I'm pretty sure I haven't met you before. So if you have, uh, a _thing_ for me then, uh, I-"

I almost choked. "You're funny, Paige. I like that. Even when I'm like this, you make me smile."

She didn't seem comforted by that.

"No, I don't have a _thing_ for you. I have a thing for your power, I guess. I'm putting on a brave face but I'm afraid, afraid of what I'll have to do in the Birdcage. I'll have to use my power on people to surive. It'll kill my emotions, make it easier to use my power again and again, and I'll lose myself, I won't be Taylor anymore, not for years and years. I'll become that other girl, the one who...who killed all those people, who _liked_ it.

"I don't want to be that girl anymore, so I want you to help me. Use your power to bring me back to myself when I start drifting away. The power of music to heal the soul, right Paige?"

She slowly nodded.

"Can we try it out? Sing me a song?"

Paige shook her head. "My mask. It has an injector at the back. If I raise my voice or sing it'll sedate me."

"Oh. Too bad." I said. "I...I'm scaring you, aren't I? Sorry about that. I'm making it sound like I'm a scary girl, but I'm as scared of the monsters down there as you are."

"Okay."

"I mean...one of the cell block leaders down there, Lustrum, she used to be my mom's teacher. Then she told all her students to emasculate their boyfriends. _Literally_ emasculate them. Down there I'll have to pretend to be _friends_ with monsters like that, just to survive. It's sickening."

Paige gulped.

"Oh. Oh, damn. Sorry. I forgot. You did that to your boyfriend, too."

"_Ex_-boyfriend." said Paige.

"Right. Don't worry, like I said, you're not a monster. You didn't do it on purpose. That's important. You're a good person at heart, like me."

I gave her an encouraging smile.

"Yeah, uh, thanks." said Paige. She returned my smile, although hers seemed a little forced. "I've only known you for ten minutes but I already feel like we're friends. Let's stick together when we get down there."

I smiled wider. "Great! I never heard your music before, but when we get down there you can hold a concert. I'll do a performance too, with my fire. Something to look forward to-"

"Enough of this nonsense," growled Lung. "None of us wants to be confined in such a place."

I wilted, and Paige did much the same. And that was it. A single harsh truth cut through all our false attempts to give ourselves courage.

There was a long moment of silence.

Lung turned his head to Page. "You do not want to be her friend, little bird. I know your kind. You are a weak-willed woman who will say or do anything that she thinks will help her survive. You see the girl as a monster. You lie to her about friendship to gain an ally, nothing more. If you were given the chance to escape this truck you would leave her to suffer her fate alone without another thought."

Paige looked down and studied the floor. She wouldn't meet my eyes.

Lung turned to me. "And you, girl. I know your kind as well. You are denying your nature. You pretend to believe in their laws and their codes. You hope the lies you tell yourself will become truth. You will fail. You care nothing for them. If you believed it would give you freedom you would burn this bird and a hundred of their soldiers without regrets."

"No, you're wrong." I said. "I'm not like that, not the _real_ me."

"I fought against you, I fought beside you. I know you. Many times they believed they contained you. Each time you made a plan, escaped, returned and made them suffer for their insult. This is no different."

"I...I don't have any escape plans. It's the Birdcage, you can't escape."

"I saw the fire in your eyes when they sentenced you to this prison. Lesser men would weep but you did not. You have a plan. A hidden weapon. A friend to save you. Simple courage to fight when they believe you are beaten."

"No! That fire in my eyes...that was just my power. A _mental_ escape from my problems, from my regrets. I don't _really_ want to escape from jail. I _deserve_ to go down there. They could have killed me, they would have been right to, but they had mercy on me and gave me a chance to live, even if I have to live with monsters. I'm...I'm okay with that. Really. It's better than I deserve."

"Lies. Lies to yourself you don't believe."

"_Don't you dare tell me what I believe!_" I screamed.

Paige cringed.

"Tell me, then." said Lung. "Tell me of your first battle, on the day you fought me. Tell this little bird, who you wish to be your friend, the reason why you fight."

"It doesn't matter. It was a mistake."

"Why did you fight? Reputation? Power? Revenge? Did that girl hurt you, steal from you, insult you?"

"I...I...it wasn't like that, I didn't have a _reason_. I never wanted to fight, I didn't start it, I just wanted her to stop. It was wrong to burn her but it wasn't my fault, it was _her damn fault_, and..."

"Um, hey, Taylor." said Paige. She met my eyes, though it was taking her a visible effort. She was taking care not to look at Lung. "You, um, you don't need to say it. You don't need to say anything if you don't want to."

I would have smiled, if I hadn't been using my power. Paige was standing up to Lung for me. Showing that he was wrong about her, that she could be a true friend after all.

"Thanks, Paige." I said. "I should tell you, though. No secrets among friends, right? It's better this way. I made it sound like I'm crazy, unstable, but _anyone_ would have done the same."

"Okay." said Paige.

"That girl was in my high school, Sophia Hess. I didn't know it then, but she was a hero, Shadow Stalker. She bullied me for months, hitting me, stealing my stuff, no one would stop her. She stole my best friend, my _only_ friend, turned Emma into a spiteful bitch from hell who was even _worse_. She knew how to hurt me, knew how to twist the knife. They just kept pushing and pushing me, never let up.

"The worst was when they stuffed my locker with shit, trash, bloody tampons left rotting for weeks. Shoved me inside and locked me in for hours. I got my power then. I could have fought back, burned them, but I held back for a month. I didn't want to sink to their level, I didn't want to use my power to hurt people. I...I even wanted to be a hero, if you can believe that. But on _that_ day they pushed me one too many times and I couldn't hold back. I couldn't keep fooling myself, telling myself they didn't deserve it.

"The worst thing is...at the trial they didn't believe me about the bullying. Why couldn't they give me that _one little thing_? Admit their hero was a bully, admit she was asking for it, admit she _had it coming_? It didn't even matter for the case, they would have locked me away anyway. But no, of course the crazy psycho killer is a liar and the precious little Ward and her school friends are _innocent fucking angels_."

As I spoke I felt an inner flame grow, dancing in my mind, calming me, reaching out to find...oh.

"_Fuck you_, Lung. You're trying to manipulate me. Provoke me. Make me think about that day, make me want to use my power."

Lung was silent.

"You're making fire right now. Inside your mouth, inside your throat. Trying to push me over the edge."

Lung turned to me and opened his mouth wide, showing a dancing flame inside. The water jets above him turned from a sprinkle to a downpour in an instant, and he closed his mouth to shelter his flame.

"You're not supposed to manipulate me. You're supposed to be the strong and silent type."

"I do not use other men as toys. Nor do I care for self-delusions. You are meant to fight. You pretend to be something you are not."

The fire inside me was growing. "That's your fault. People like you. The whole screwed up _system_. Every day telling me what I am, telling me what I should do, pushing me against the wall and telling me I should fight back when all I ever wanted was to be left alone.

"I thought I was learning how the system worked. When their 'hero' Sophia pushed me over and over again I took it like a chump and they didn't care what happened to me at all. Then the _one time_ I hit back they suddenly care a _hell of a lot_. I take that as a lesson, I think I'm finally getting through to them. So I start hitting back more and more and more, making them understand what that pain is like. I _know_ they're feeling my pain because they keep sending more and more guys to fight me, like they really care what I'm feeling.

"Then we fight long enough and I realize that all along they've been _training_ me, teaching me, because I'm not acting like myself anymore, I'm acting like _them_, the system. I'm not just hitting back at them anymore, trading pain for pain, I'm _attacking_, I'm burning them _ten times worse_ than any pain I've felt myself, giving them pain for no reason at all. Dragging them into a house on fire where they're helpless, watching them call for help and laughing, burning them one limb at a time like I'm pulling wings off a butterfly. Acting just like Emma and Sophia and all the rest.

"So I finally give in and say 'Now we understand each other! You were right all along! Now I'll be a _good fucking girl_ just like you always wanted!'. I start really going after them. They hear me loud and clear and they send in the big gun, the embodiment of the system in all its glory. And what does he do? He doesn't appreciate my hard work at all. I go to all that effort for him and his _fucked up_ system, roasting them alive, heating them until their bones melt, and no, nothing, no response, he doesn't fucking care. He floats there like an angel of judgement and looks at me with a dead stare like I'm the lowest worm on the earth. Then he pulls out some bullshit oxykinesis power, waves a single hand and puts out all the fires in the city and _takes it all away from me_. All that enlightenment and everything I've learned fading like a dream and in an instant I'm back to the Taylor I was a month ago, drowning in my tears like a useless sack of shit.

"No. Not acceptable. I'm not going to live like that anymore. So I give up. I'm done. I won't fight it. I'll join your godforsaken system. Send me to the Birdcage? Fine. Do whatever you want. Won't stop me from doing what _I_ want. Hah."

"Taylor." said Paige. I turned to her and she shrank back, like I hit her with a physical force. "Um. T, Taylor. Are you okay?"

"I'm not worried about a thing." I said.

"You sound like a robot."

"Yeah, that happens." I said. "Another perk of my piece of shit power."

"An angry robot."

"Yeah. When I swear in the robot voice it sounds hilarious. I found out in the containment cell." I cleared my throat. "_I've had enough of these motherfucking bitchsucking cockbags locking us in this cuntforsaken shitvan_."

Paige gave a nervous laugh.

"It was hard keeping myself in the right state of mind in containment. Locked in a little cell 24/7. Nothing to burn, no clothes, no food but nutrient slop, no one but me and a little security camera in the corner. I finally did it, figured out how to get in this mental state without the fire. Made myself stop crying and _think_. The sedatives took me out of it but now I'm back again.

"Sophia was right, you know. Self-harm is a response to stress. I looked it up a month ago when I was testing my power. I was afraid that covering myself with fire meant that I had a mental disorder.

"Cutting, burning, branding. Even trichotillomania, eating all your hair. Someone under a lot of stress could do something like that in a day or two, while waiting to be sent to a maximum-security prison. The jail warden wouldn't even blink an eye.

"And the warden wouldn't be paranoid enough to check your toilet to make sure you were shitting the hair back out. Even though you can braid it together to make a rope, when you're lying down on the floor so the camera can't see what you're doing. You can fit a lot of it in your mouth and throat and stomach if you try. And hair is flammable. And I can use my power to burn it as long as it isn't growing from my body."

I licked my lips, ran my tongue around the inside of my mouth. Felt the ball of rope I had made, resting between my teeth and my right cheek, the rest of the thread trailing back into my throat. I took a few rapid breaths and coughed, coughed again, coughed hard. It took fifteen minutes of retching and hacking before I pulled the rest of the rope from my throat and stomach up into my mouth. Enough that it filled my mouth and I had to let half of it hang out from my lips, the thick ball of rope at the end.

I mumbled around the thread. "Paige. Listen. Need help. Wanna get out?"

Paige was pale, anxious, sick from watching me hack up a rope of hair. She nodded anyway. "Okay. Tell me what to do."

"Can't move through my own flame, need to set things on fire. Two fires, one on me, one outside foam. Need to keep most rope for me, harder under water, need to be fast before the jet shuts me down. Put the rest outside in a dry spot, send flame down the rope, easier with a medium. With me?"

Paige nodded again.

"Gonna toss rest to you. Hold it under your chin, spool it out. Then I'll tell you where to put it."

I rocked my head back and forth, pinching the thread with my teeth, letting the rope outside my mouth swing in a rhythm. Then at the peak of the rhythm I swung my head harder, let go with my teeth, let the ball of rope at the end swing out to Paige. She leaned her head back and then snapped it forward, trapping the ball of rope between the straps of the restraint mask under her chin and the mass of foam around her neck.

"Got it!" said Paige. She smiled behind her mask. "What now?"

"Hmm. You got it stuck in the foam. Can't spool it out now. Can't make a pile."

Paige rocked her head slightly, felt that the ball of thread under her chin wasn't moving. Her face fell. "Oh. I'm, I'm sorry. I-"

"Calm down. I'll improvise." I considered the situation. The ball of rope stuck in the foam wasn't enough, not a big enough fire in one place. I needed more material, something flammable...ah. Yes, that would work.

"Paige. Put your head back down, keep your neck against the rope. Push down hard and firm."

"O, okay. " said Paige. "Now what?"

I closed my eyes and took a few deep breaths, drawing as much oxygen as I could into my lungs. Then I used my power and summoned flames from my throat, igniting the rope I held in my mouth as I spat it out onto my chin, covering my face with flames. Sent another thread of flame racing down the rope, igniting the ball under Paige's chin. As the fires ignited I was already stoking them, turning up the heat, feeding on all the available material. I wasn't going for efficiency here. Speed and size, the biggest bursts I could make before the jets came on. I sensed them bloom into existence, Lung's small flame now dwarfed by two stars growing bigger, bigger, almost big enough to...yes.

The instant the water jets came on I _moved_, and then I was falling from the air, tumbling to the floor. I made it. The jets were futilely filling an empty pile of containment foam, gushing out water with such intensity they made a deafening, shrill screeching sound.

Oh. Right. Not the jets.

Paige.

I wrapped my arms around her head and smothered the fires on her mask, her hair, her feathers. Used my power to draw heat away from her and into my palms, then jammed my fingers into the injection device on the back of her neck. Good, the needles were melted. I probably got them fast enough that she wasn't injected with sedatives.

I tore off her mask and heated the metal buckles until they were red hot, then smeared the molten metal over the nozzles in the ceiling, blocking them off so they couldn't pump sedatives into the air. I took more molten metal from what was left of the ruins of the injection device, used it to block off three of the water jets above Lung.

Paige's screams were dying down, reduced to whimpers. I gave her a second look. Hmm, mostly intact. Her hair and feathers burned better than her skin, so she only picked up a few first-degree burns. I might have a use for her. But she was in a panic, needed a boost of motivation keep her cooperative. I wasn't in the best state of mind to handle that but I had to give it a shot.

I forced my mouth into a smile and patted her on the cheek. "Calm down Paige. You made it. Get ready to fight."

Paige drew back from me, whimpering. Oh well. I had higher priorities anyway. I turned to Lung. Flames were dancing around his body now, but they weren't doing anything to melt his containment foam.

"Lung. Your flame goes through metal better than mine. Aim through the walls and light something up so I can teleport outside." I said.

"Release me first." he growled.

"I'm not going to leave you behind. I need to get outside to open the door and get supplies to melt your foam."

"Help me melt the wall behind me."

"The walls are fabricated to resist melting. We can't get out that way. Better to heat them all the way through, get something on the outside to ignite."

"Release me!"

Troublesome.

"You dumbass. You were the one who wanted to get out of here." I said. I slapped him, then reared back and punched him in the nose.

"Fuck you!" growled Lung. The flames around him doubled in intensity.

I punched him again. Then looked at my hand. Right, not doing that again.

"You're thick-headed." I said. I stepped back as far as I could in the cramped van and then hit him with a spinning kick, breaking his nose and sending blood splashing over his face.

"Motherfucker! I'll kill you!" screamed Lung. The flames around him grew again and silver lines appeared on his face, metal scales sliding out from beneath his skin. Steam was rising above him now where the two remaining water jets were turned on at full blast. The containment foam around him bulged outward half an inch, pushed away as his body began to grow.

I kicked him in the face again, then put my hands on his cheeks and sent a wave of pure heat into his body, burning his skin and giving off the smell of cooking meat. Lung screamed and thrashed, the foam bulging another half an inch.

A small sound behind me. Paige was staring at us, shaking her head back and forth and whimpering.

I gave her a look. "Don't look at me like that. He gets power from being in a fight. It's not like I have a thing for him or anything."

"I, uh, r, right, sorry, of course not." Paige stammered. "N, not that there would be anything wrong with that."

I torched Lung again, ignoring his stream of curses.

"Are you staying here or do you want to come with us? Sing to the soldiers, make them throw down their weapons, help us make our getaway?"

Paige started at me, wide-eyed. She thought we were lunatics, knew we were about to run head-on into another fight with the Protectorate. But she didn't have a choice. If she refused, if she stayed here like a good prisoner, it wasn't like they would give her credit for good behavior. They'd still send her to the Birdcage, and they couldn't do anything to help her once she was in there. Right now I was the only person in the world willing to do her a favor.

Paige swallowed, then nodded fiercely. "Yes, take me with you. I'll do whatever you want."

"Hm." I tilted my head, regarded her. Lung was burning now, waves of heat radiating off his body. "Not sure I want you, though. It'll be a pain to keep you alive with the heat we make."

"What? But you..." Her face fell. "I, I, no, please, I promise I'll be good, I-"

I leaned forward and grabbed her chin, forced her to look me in the eye. "You'd better be. I'll ask you to do things you disagree with. Things _I_ disagree with, when I'm not _pure_ like this." I moved my face closer. "If you try to get out of it, if you sing to calm me down, if you make me become _that_ Taylor again so I have to _feel_ what I'm doing...I'll punish you. Lung's a brute, he'd kill you and be done with it. I'll make it slow."

I summoned a flame from my right hand, reshaped it into the figure of a woman in a costume, an effigy of Paige's stage persona. I made the figure writhe in place, limbs of fire tearing off its body one by one and wicking away until nothing was left but the head. Then I reached up and crushed the head in my hand, making a fist, letting tendrils of flame squirt between my fingers and run down my arm like spilled blood.

"I've done that to people for less. I'll think of something new for you. Understand?"

Paige gulped. She nodded vigorously.

"Good. Sit tight for now."

Lung reared back his head and spat a stream of pure heat through the side of the van. A small fire blossomed into being twenty feet to my left, then moved away from me at eighty miles an hour - ah. A tree on the side of the highway, receding behind us. The van must be racing to take us to the nearest containment facility, local heroes already en route. They would never make it in time, not if I had anything to say about it.

I reached out to the fire, stoked it, made it grow. Then I _moved_, and I was gone.


	2. Chapter 2

I sat in the forest on the branch of a burning tree, considering my options for breaking Lung and Paige out of the maximum-security containment van. I liked my chances. I was already in my _pure_ state, freed from my emotional hangups, no fears or regrets or codes to hold me back.

Now I needed to _use_ that clarity to make a solid plan. Once the battle began, once I started another inferno...my powers would respond to the flames and drive me to extremes, make me lose sight of my goals and start killing people on impulse. So I had to get the plan straight now, fix it clearly in my mind. A plan I would keep following while surrounded by flames and death.

The simplest route would be to ditch Lung and Paige and make my escape. But I didn't have any illusions about how long I would last on my own. The PRT would be looking for me, they would know I was in this forest, and my advantage of mobility came at the cost of setting my surroundings on fire, a signal flare telling them where I was. Even if I made it out it would be a matter of days before I lost my purity of mind, got my emotions back and did something stupid to give myself away, maybe even turned myself in. No. I needed to stick with Lung, with his flames that would keep me _myself_.

If I was going to stick with Lung, I'd need to break him out of the van. That was easy enough. All I had to do was brawl with him until he grew big and strong enough to tear through the walls. But that would create enough heat in the cramped space of the van that it would bake Paige alive, and Paige was too useful for me to discard. Her power would make it so much easier to live on the lam. We could support ourselves with low-key thefts by simply compelling people to give us access to their bank accounts, instead of resorting to headline-grabbing pyrotechnic heists. And she could rein in my power when it got out of control, stop me from lashing out and drawing attention.

I had to plan this carefully. Paige was useful in the long term, yes, but when I was standing in an inferno with someone in front of me to burn I didn't _care_ about the long term. She wasn't useful for my goals for the next day, for the next hour, and she was sure to piss me off somehow with her skittish scaredy cat personality. If I kept her around for long I'd start wanting to hurt her, to burn her to death for kicks. So it was important to make her part of my plans. Plan for the next hour: keep Paige alive. Got to remember that.

To keep Paige alive I would have to take the PRT officers alive and convince them to open the back of the van. Then we could steal the PRT van, drive away...no. The van would be loaded with tracking devices. I'd need to hijack a civilian car. Hell, I'd need to hijack a car anyway just to catch up with them. The PRT van was driving at 80 miles an hour, and they had a few minutes head start on me. Okay. Catch up, set Lung and Paige free, then drive away in a hijacked civilian car...no. The PRT would be expecting that, they would set up a blockade manned by a dozen heroes, check occupants car by car until they found us. We'd need to find another way out, a way where they wouldn't follow us. We'd need to use misdirection...ah. That would work.

I turned my attention to the highway. There weren't many cars at 4:30 AM - probably exactly the reason why the PRT was transporting us so early in the morning - but there were enough, a car going past every few seconds. I judged my shot, then threw a precisely aimed fireball into the driver's seat of a passing car.

I _moved_ through the flame and found myself sitting on the lap of a woman who was burning to death, thrashing her limbs and screaming in a blind panic. Annoying. I flexed my power to heat up the flames on her head by a few hundred degrees, and my human seat went gratifyingly still and quiet. I gripped the steering wheel and tried to get the car under control.

It took me a few minutes to get used to the controls. It was my first time driving a car. It should have been easy, I had seen Dad drive our old wreck of a car hundreds of times before, but it was surprisingly tricky in practice. Seeing was leagues away from doing, it seemed. Still, driving on the highway turned out to be fairly simple. Steering wheel to aim, gas pedal at maximum to catch up to the van, stay on the left side of the road to keep out of the way of the slowpokes.

As I drove I sent a steady stream of flame out the windows, leaving a scattered trail of flaming car wrecks behind me and setting the forests on both sides of the highway ablaze. That was a lesson I learned in my first fight in Brockton Bay. Don't let them contain you, always give yourself an out. Set fire to everything around you, in the streets and the buildings, in the cellars and closets, in the tunnels and sewers underground where the heroes won't think to look. Then you can move at any time to anywhere you need to be, you can ask the flames anything you want to know about the battlefield, because the flames _are_ the battlefield. You can feel it when the heroes move - when they extinguish flames to make a safe passage, when the tougher capes walk through the flames and disupt them, when the weaker ones catch on fire and run madly through the streets. This time I would do better. I knew the battle was coming. So I would _create_ my battlefield, create an inferno spreading for miles through the countryside.

It took me a while to get up to speed on the highway. The first car I hijacked reminded me of Dad's car, out of date and slow. But switching cars was a simple matter - all it took was pulling up alongside the car I wanted and tossing a fireball into the driver's seat. Four car changes, one car accident, and seven charred bodies later I was set. A fancy sports car with a maximum speed of 130 miles per hour, more than enough to catch the heavy PRT containment van.

After ten minutes I got my first sight of the convoy. The maximum-security containment van holding Lung and Paige was flanked by two standard PRT vans with armor plating and turrent-mounted containment foam sprayers. If the three vans had spread out across the highway, one in each lane, they would have blocked my path completely. The armor plating would protect them from my flames unless I got close and matched speeds to hit them with a focused torrent of fire, and that would have made me a sitting duck for their containment foam. Unfortunately for them they had lined up their vans in the left lane, presumably so as not to run over civilian cars going at legal speeds.

I moved into the right lane and accelerated, speeding past the convoy at 110 miles per hour. My car took a few hits from their sprayers but the containment foam just stuck to my doors and windows, nothing to slow me down. They would have had better luck if they aimed at the road in front of me to bog down my wheels. As I passed them I retaliated by aiming a steady stream of fire at bottom of the maximum-security van, trying to melt the tires. I must have had some success because the convoy slowed down a tick as I passed them.

I kept going forward at high speed until I estimated that I was a full mile ahead of the convoy. Then I set my trap. I got three civilian cars in view at the same time. Then I shifted my car into the left lane, threw a fireball into one of the other cars, and _moved_. A few car swaps later and I had a makeshift blockade. Four cars scattered along the highway in different lanes, too close together for the PRT vans to avoid them without coming to a complete stop.

The convoy saw my barricade and hit the brakes, frantically trying to slow down to avoid a crash. I greeted them with a series of fireballs thrown at their windshields, hoping that melting the glass would be easier than melting the metal armor on the sides of the vans. Their turrets sprayed me with foam but I simply teleported between the wrecked cars whenever they hit me. One of the turrets changed to a white, foamy substance that put out my fires where it touched them, but it was too little too late. I had melted their windshields enough that I could push my flames into the vans, setting their seats and equipment on fire and forcing the drivers outside.

"Surrender now!" I shouted. "Out of the vans, throw down your weapons, your jackets, your belts, empty your pockets! Throw everything on the ground!"

It took a minute before they were all committed to following my instructions. I had to press the issue, torch the inside of the two standard vans and burn the hands of a particularly stubborn officer who tried to draw a gun on me. Once the officers were all in order, I addressed them.

"Who's in charge here?"

The officers looked at each other.

"Answer me now or I'll tear you apart!" I created flames in my hands, shaped them into a pair of giant, bestial claws.

One of the officers stepped forward. "I'm the captain in charge of this convoy."

"Good. The rest of you, lie down on the ground over there."

They complied, some of them with ostentatious displays of reluctance. Showboats.

"Good job everyone." I said. "You surrendered, so I'm not going to kill you. But I'm going to make sure you don't try any tricks."

And then I burned them. It would have been safer and more satisfying to kill them all but...no, follow the plan. I needed their captain to cooperate, and I wasn't even sure he was the one with the information I needed. So instead I sent out a single tendril of flame and burned their feet one by one, making them scream and sob with pain. I gave a little extra to the ones who had been showboating, just for good measure. They wouldn't be chasing after us any time soon.

That left the captain. His jaw was tight with anger but he was still composed. Good. It wouldn't do to have him breaking down in the middle of negotiations.

"Open the door to the containment van. Let them out."

"We can't open it. It's a tinkertech lock, only Dragon has the code." he said.

"That's a lie. You have a way to get in. For emergencies, if one of us was choking to death." I said.

"We don't. Not even for an emergency. I'm sorry but there's no way."

"Okay. I'll burn their feet to a crisp this time and ask again."

"I'm telling the truth, we can't open it! They don't give us the code! It's a security measure for exactly this situation!"

Troublesome. I'd have to try another tack. "Hey, don't fuck with me on this. I don't want to kill you. I'm trying to save your lives here. We don't _need_ you. We're going to open the door anyway. Lung's growing right now and he'll get strong enough to tear off the walls in a few minutes. When he does he's going to be pissed, he'll tear you limb from limb. If you open the door now I'll be able to convince him to let you go."

There was a loud bang and a dent appeared in the side of the containment van. Lung hitting it with a punch.

The captain wavered, almost said something and then shut his lips.

"If you don't open the door we'll fight you and you'll die. Horribly. Painfully. You know fighting us isn't your job. That's a hero's job. Leave it to them. What are you trying to accomplish here? If you fuck with me you're volunteering for painful death by fire just to delay us five fucking minutes. Think about that for a second. Think about how your family will feel when you get yourself killed for such a stupid thing. And then open the damn door."

The captain stood still, didn't move a muscle.

"Okay. It's your funeral. Literally. Who first?" I called flame to my hands, pointed to the officer who pulled a gun on me. "Him? Do you think his wife will appreciate it if I burn off his crotch? Or should I melt-"

"Okay, okay! I'll open it, I'll do it."

"Finally. Make it quick. You fucked with me long enough."

The captain looked at his subordinates, then began walking to the back of the truck.

"Quickly! Run!" I burned his back. He staggered, increased his pace to a jog.

He reached the keypad at the back of the truck, tapped in a short sequence of numbers. Then he grabbed one of the handles and swung the door open, moving to the side as he did so that the occupants wouldn't see him. A smart man to avoid Lung's ire.

Lung barreled out of the door as soon as it opened. He must have heard the door unlocking with his enhanced hearing. He was nine feet tall now, covered in scales. He jumped out onto the street and looked in all directions, searching for an enemy.

"No one to fight, not yet." I said. "I'd appreciate if you burned some of the scenery, gave us a smokescreen from air attacks." Lung looked at me, snarled, then stretched out his arms and sent tongues of flame into the forest around us.

Paige was still in the van, stuck in containment foam. Sweat was pouring down her face. She looked ready to faint from the heat of being in a sealed box with Lung. I turned to the captain. "Now, the gas you use to melt the foam. Quickly."

The captain looked to where his equipment lay on the ground. "It's on my belt, it's the-"

"I have it." Lung interrupted. He strode to the pile of equipment and yanked off a small green canister with a nozzle. He pressed a button on the dispenser and pointed the nozzle at the foam around Paige. A fine green mist sprayed out, dissolving the foam wherever it touched. Of course. Lung would know their standard kit from his many run-ins with the PRT.

After thirty seconds of effort, Paige struggled her way out and collapsed to the floor of the van, still covered in a sticky yellow residue. Lung wordlessly tossed the dispenser to me and resumed torching the landscape. I went to Paige and finished the job, spraying green mist until she was clean. As I did, I spoke.

"Paige, I have a plan. I'm going to get us a new car. While I do that I need you to sing to the PRT guys we caught outside. Make them follow our instructions."

Paige stared at me, a lost look in her eyes. She was shell-shocked. Hadn't been expecting to escape, hadn't been in a fight before, couldn't believe this was real. Useless. Why was I hanging on to this bird?

I grabbed her shoulders and shook her. "Hey, Paige! You listening? Do you understand me?"

Paige shuddered, then nodded. "Yeah. I have to sing to the guys outside."

"Right. Make them follow your orders. The first thing you need to do is tell them to face the road, back the way we came, and keep a watch for me. Tell them to keep facing that way and shout when they see me coming. Looks like they've closed off the roads so if a car comes it'll be me. Okay? Repeat it to me."

"Face the road that way, keep a watch for you, shout when they see you." said Paige.

"Good. I burned most of their feet so they can't come after us," Paige winced, "but they can still crawl if you need them to move. Now go, hurry." I helped her out of the van and pointed her to the officers. I looked at Lung but there was no need to repeat it for him, he would have heard everything we said.

I focused on the flame around me, stretching back along the highway where my forest fires burned. And I _moved_, jumping miles in a matter of seconds, flickering between burning trees and car wrecks.

It took me less than a minute to find what I needed. A van stopped by the side of the road, engine still running, three people outside. Two men and a woman in casual business attire. Three officemates on a commute? The driver was one of the ones I'd burned, the woman laying on the side of the road next to the van. The other two were kneeling next to her, one pressing a wet cloth to her face.

I had to make this quick. I jumped down from the smoldering wreck where I stood, summoned pillars of fire in my hands.

"Hey, you three. Do what I say and I won't hurt you!" I shouted.

One of them screamed and tried to run. I sent a flood of flames to block his path. "Stay put! Shut up! Do what I say and you get to live!"

They stared at me, shaking and huddling together.

"I need new clothes to replace these prison duds. Strip! Take off your clothes now and put them on the ground in front of you."

The two standing ones hesitantly started unbuttoning their shirts.

"Hurry! Just shirts and pants are fine. Help the woman on the ground get hers off, too."

Once the clothes were mine, I grabbed them and tossed them on the passenger seat.

"All of you, get in the back seat. If she can't move, carry her in there."

The men complied, supporting the woman between them and helping her into the van. I stood next to the door.

"Good job, guys. Too bad for you, I need to fake a couple of deaths."

I sent a dozen tendrils of flame into the van. The younger man I killed, focusing my flames on the join between his brain and spinal cord to end his life in an instant. The older man and the woman I left alive, burning their arms and legs until their screams died out and they fell unconscious from the pain. I pushed them all down onto the floor so they couldn't be seen from outside the van. It wasn't foolproof, but with luck a low-ranked Thinker would read the van as having three living people, myself plus a man and a woman of the proper ages to match Lung and Paige. I got in the front seat and began to drive.

I returned to a chorus of shouts announcing my arrival. Good, Paige had gotten the drivers to cooperate. The PRT captain stood motionless in the middle of the highway, staring at my car with a single-minded intensity. His men were doing much the same from their prone positions on the ground. Paige was sitting on the ground, her back against the PRT van. Lung was pacing back and forth, his scales gone and his body reduced to his normal size. He had taken out his frustration on the forest; the air was thick with smoke from the blazing fires on the sides of the highway. Good. Aerial surveillance wouldn't be able to see what we were doing.

I stopped the van, jogged over to Lung and Paige, and told them the rest of my plan...

What the PRT officers saw, what they reported in their debriefing, was simple. Paige's instructions forced them to stand motionless and watch the highway. They saw us pick up their wallets and weapons and stuff them in the van. Then they saw us get in the van, start the engine, and drive away until we were out of sight, shooting flames out the windows to spread the forest fire. I gave Paige the passenger seat. It would put a chink in our facade if she noticed the bodies in the back and let out a scream of horror.

What the PRT officers didn't see was what happened as soon as we were out of their sight. We stopped the car, changed into the civilian clothes, and tossed our prison clothes in the back with the bodies. Lung and Paige left the van and slipped into the forest, Lung protecting the two of them by using his pyrokinesis to repel the heat from the flames, Paige carrying the money and weapons we thought we could use. I stayed in the car with the decoy bodies and a pile of weapons in the back seat, the tinkertech ones with embedded tracking devices that would let the PRT track me down. I drove down the highway at top speed, shooting flames out of both sides of the car to make up for Lung's absence.

I got fifteen miles down the road before the Protectorate found me. The only warning I got was a few dark specks in the sky peeking out over the top of the forest, just visible in the light of the sunrise. I recognized Legend's bodysuit, speck of bright blue, and saw a flash of light in the air. In that instant I reached out to the tendrils of flame that I had wrapped around the engine block and shoved them into the gas tank, detonating the van. As the van blew apart I _moved_ through the flames into the forest.

I stayed for a moment to watch the spectacle. The van and a quarter mile of the surrounding highway were annihilated by a massive laser, a storm of razor-sharp forcefields, and some sort of space-warping implosion bomb. Disappointing, in a way. I went to all that effort to make sure the wreck would have three bodies mangled beyond recognition and covered in scraps of our prison garb. But it was better this way. Total annihilation would make it harder for Thinkers to see through my ruse.

Then I was off. It only took a few dozen jumps of searching before I sensed the telltale disturbance in the forest fires from Lung's pyrokinesis.

We were free.


	3. Chapter 3

We were free, but I was losing my purity.

It was three days since we escaped the convoy and I still didn't trust myself to sleep. There was still too much to do. Fixing up the house we were renting, finding a source of money, setting up a contingency plan to take hostages if the heroes found us. The moment I let myself sleep I would lose my purity, lose the cold rationality that let me handle my tasks no matter how dangerous they were. If I tried to relax, tried to let my mind drift into dreams, it would only guarantee that I _couldn't_ sleep. Because as my mind drifted I would start thinking back to the bed in my old room, my old house with Mom and Dad, my old _life_ in Brockton Bay before I had powers. My emotions would flooding back in a tide of pain and guilt and regret, overwhelming me, drowning me, burying me alive.

I would have to tough it out. It was hard. I couldn't let myself go over the edge with sleep deprivation, get so impulsive that I wanted to burn pedestrians to death for the crime of carrying dancing flames at the end of their cigarettes. But I couldn't let myself go over the edge the other way either. My emotions would rush back all at once and turn me into a useless heap of tears, make me do something stupid like calling Dad or the police or _Eidolon_, knowing they would trace my call, as good as turning myself in. Lung wasn't stupid, he'd know the moment I did it and he would make sure I didn't survive my betrayal. I wouldn't be able to fight him off when I was in that impure state of mind, when I wasn't willing to torch the neighborhood to give myself mobility. So I had to keep going, stay awake and hold on to my purity of mind until my exhaustion grew strong enough to overwhelm my guilt and regret, until I could sleep the sleep of the dead.

I sat in my room in the house we were renting, feet swinging off the edge of my bed, tabbing through websites on my stolen laptop. The news was still full of stories about our breakout. Thirty five dead, thirty injured. The blaze we started was classified as a class-C environmental disaster, my twenty minutes of effort turning fifty square miles of forest into a charred wasteland. The PRT captain was facing charges for his incompetence, and his superior and _her_ superior were under pressure to resign. Legend, Narwhal, and the other flying artillery of the Guild were being praised for their role in stopping the 'Pyromaniac Pair' for good. Satisfying, that if their official press release was to be believed, they bought into my ruse and thought we were dead.

On the other side of the room was my waterfire display, a crude version of the original one that I built in my old room in Brockton Bay. Hundreds of candles were clustered together on a raised platform, surrounded by a pool of water to make sure they wouldn't get out of control and torch the house if I let the flames lull me to sleep. It was my way of meditating, exercising my power and practicing my control. I would close my eyes and _sense_ the candles, reach out with my power to draw heat from _that_ candle, pour heat into _that_ one, use the candles as pixels in a screen to form words and pictures and scenes from memory. Then tease the candle flames to rise in the air, a hundred tendrils of light spiraling into abstract geometric shapes or animal wildlife or effigies of celebrities, acting out scenes from adventure novels or Shakespeare or my own imagination.

When I finished building my display I stayed awake all night meditating, testing my power and refining my purity of mind. My power had grown, matured from experience in battle. More progress from two flame-scarred fights than I got from an entire month of passive meditation - that probably told me something about my relationship with my power, or my power's relationship with me.

In a roundabout way my meditation fulfilled my promise to Paige, that I would show her what I could do with my flame when I wasn't using it as a weapon of war. When I opened my eyes after my first hour of meditation I saw Lung and Paige standing in the doorway, watching as I formed a troupe of dancing ballerinas from the candle flames. Lung left soon afterward but Paige stayed for hours. She sat quietly in the corner and watched with rapt attention, even when I switched to precision drills and spent thirty minutes lighting up single candles one by one. I didn't mind her presence. If my emotions weren't being deadened by my power, I suppose I would have been pleased to have my work appreciated by an artist.

Paige was turning out to be more useful than I expected. She knew how to change appearances, how to adopt a new visual style for a performance, and she turned her skills to the task of keeping us under the radar. I did the shopping, since I was the only one of us who could enter a store without being recognized as the 6'4'' asian man with the build of a brute, or the yellow-haired girl with a mop of singed feathers. Paige instructed me what to buy with our stolen money: scissors for me to clip her feathers and give her a rather severe haircut, dye to turn her hair from baby-duck yellow to a more conventional blonde, makeup to change the apparent shape of her face and to cover up her burns while they healed. More supplies for me: cosmetics, a long auburn wig to cover the tattered remnants of my curly locks, contacts and sunglasses to cover up the orange glow from from my eyes. To my surprise she convinced Lung to submit to a makeover, too, and Paige's revisions to his wardrobe somehow managed to make him look almost unthreatening.

Paige more than lived up to my expectations in the money department, too. We collected a thousand dollars in a single night by taking her out to a few Karaoke bars. Her singing voice was stunning - she commanded the full attention of everyone in the room, even singing in a fakey accent to hide her identity, even singing crappy pop music, even before the effects of her power set in. I caught a hint of it myself in the faint trickle of sound leaking through my earplugs, as I waded through the pacified crowd and picked their pockets.

It was important to get money soon, because we couldn't stay under the radar forever. The first time we got into a serious fight our pyrotechnics would get the attention of the authorities, and then they would come down on us hard. Hell, the only reason they hadn't put kill orders on yet was that they thought we were dead. Lung suggested the idea of changing scenery, saying that he had done it three times in his life before. Paige and I agreed. So our goal was to collect enough money to get a fresh start in a country out of the Protectorate's jurisdiction, maybe somewhere in South America or Eastern Europe.

The next step was to use Paige's power to start taking over bank accounts. I was still working out the kinks in my plan. It had to be subtle, clean, something that couldn't be traced back to us afterward. Paige's power made her subjects obedient to instructions but it didn't erase their memories. We needed a way to get her subjects to give us the information we wanted without reporting us to the law after her power wore off. We could always fry them, of course, but we were trying to be low-key here.

I would have to be careful to keep Paige on board with the bank idea. Whenever I brought it up she became almost pathetically agreeable, trying to mask the hints of discomfort and fear on her face. I assumed her discomfort was from her lingering moral objections to stealing millions of dollars. It seemed that she still thought of herself as an essentially good person caught up in a desperate situation. She rationalized using her power during our escape as a moment of desperation, and the karaoke thing as an audience paying for her performance. Taking the life savings from a few rich families was apparently going too far.

Her fear, though, that was fear of _me_. Fear of how I would react if she spoke up and voiced her objections to breaking the law. Well, to be fair, she was right to be afraid. If she got cold feet at the wrong moment, if she messed up a plan when we needed money for _her_ sake and _all our sakes_, if she betrayed us after she _promised_ to do whatever it took to survive...well, I might lose patience with her and do something unwise. Hopefully that wouldn't happen. Paige was getting better at reading my moods, and when she thought I was unstable she stuck with Lung like a shadow, trusting him to stop me before I did any serious damage.

Ah, Lung. He was going by the alias Kent Kimura, now. I had expected him to be nothing more than a warlord, a thug who was given superpowers and craved nothing more than rule a territory and fight an endless succession of battles. Well to be fair...he was. But there was a reason he wasn't on the news for a new fight every week, the same reason he had survived so long.

He was canny, smart in a low-key way. He knew how to stay under the radar, how to cast off his cape identity as an angry brute and act like a perfect gentleman in public. He wanted to rule a territory but he didn't have foolish ambitions of nationwide conquest, and was practical enough to prefer to live in a country where he wouldn't call down the collective forces of the Protectorate every time he showed his face. He had been in enough deadly fights that he knew when to retreat and cut his losses, even when he was a twenty foot firebreathing dragon. After a day or two living with him it dawned on me that our fight in Brockton Bay wasn't just about _him_ escalating, turning into a firebreathing dragon that fueled my power; it was just as much about _me_ refusing to leave the fight after I found that I couldn't hurt him, coming back to chase him down and burn his men.

Lung knew how to plan a robbery, too. Not just the 'punch through the walls and steal the bank vault' kind, but the subtle kind the victims wouldn't notice until days had gone by. When I asked him where he learned the talent he refused to answer. So far we had hit one target, a house he picked out for their level of wealth and for the fact that their chimney showed signs of frequent use. I simply waited for the family to go to sleep, then used my power to rekindle the dying embers in their fireplace and teleport inside.

After the robbery Lung had an odd look in his eyes, one I had never seen on him before. It struck me that our _modus operandi_ of robbing houses with teleportation must have been the same way his old subordinate Oni Lee made his money. Hell, Oni Lee probably hit houses with fireplaces, too, to hide the carbon ash he left behind when he teleported. But now Oni Lee was dead. Killed in Brockton Bay when our teleportation duel was interrupted by a stray rocket from Miss Militia. I had retaliated against the hero by blitzing her, building a wall of flames to cut off her escape, and then getting the hell out of there; even in my first fight, in the middle of an inferno, I knew better than to get in the way of Lung's revenge.

I think Lung saw something of his old assassin in me, a light shining in his eyes when I told him about my successful heist in my cold and unemotional tones. It was gratifying, actually, that even in this pure mental state I could still provide my allies with emotional support.

Somehow those thoughts led me to browse the video folder of my stolen laptop. I found myself watching home videos of a family's life, idly reenacting them in the air with my candle flames. Why was I watching them? Curiosity, maybe. I had been careful to avoid encountering the family in person when I robbed their house. I hadn't trusted myself to leave them unharmed if I attracted their attention, not with fire around. Or maybe it was nostalgia for family life with Mom and Dad, an emotional _impurity_ creeping into my mind. It made sense, in a way. I was on the lam with Lung and Canary, and older man and an older woman, in a house where we lived on our own. It would be natural for me to think of...

Oh. I stared at my flames saw Mom and Dad staring back at me. My flames were disobeying me now. Not reflecting what I saw on the screen anymore, reflecting what they saw in my mind, instead. What they saw in my _heart_.

This was bad. I was losing my purity with every passing hour. I had to avoid thinking of my old life, my old family. But that _avoidance_ came with an emotion, a fear, that brought on more emotions in its wake...

The burning image of Mom subtly shifted. The same height, the same build, but now her face was strange, its features smoothed flat, and she wore the same casual business suit I had in my closet...Oh. Oh, God. It was the woman I killed, back on the highway. Burned off half her face and forced her off the road, came back and burned her arms and legs until she passed out from the pain, blew her to bits when I set off the gas tank in the van.

I felt a tug of sympathy for the woman's family. For her children, who would be as inconsolable as I was when Mom died in her accident. For her husband, who would be as damaged as Dad was, who did his best for me but lost something essential on that day and never got it back. For her parents, grieving like Gram for a brilliant woman who died too young. All that pain I couldn't deny I _knew_. The pain I had suffered, that I had wished I could cure, that I had wished to protect others from by becoming a hero.

Now I had inflicted that pain on an innocent woman's family. On _thirty five_ families, more if I counted the people I'd merely maimed. And all for what? To survive? To live another few days as a fugitive, an outcast from society? When did _survival_ become so important to me?

I always knew I was a survivor of a kind, even before I got my powers. I took a sort of twisted pride in tolerating the shit life dumped on me. When my best friend betrayed me, taunting me and twisting the knife every day, when I didn't have any other friends to go to for comfort...I had let her do it, never once struck back at her, didn't even _talk_ back to her, treated her with respect she didn't deserve. Because I thought I could survive it and live on.

But in all of that time I was never a survivor simply to _survive_, for its own sake. I had a moral code to follow, something I wanted to achieve. In my dark moments I had thought of Mom, of how she would want me to do the right thing. Of Dad, of how disappointed he would be if I resorted to violence. Of my future, of graduating school when I could leave the bullies behind and get a fresh start on my _real_ life. Hell, I had even thought of the _heroes_ I idolized as a kid, who I looked up to for their virtue in using their powers to help humanity. When I got my powers I still had that moral code. I brainstormed tactics to use with my powers - how to save people from house fires, to create free energy, to travel long distances in a flash.

Now I had used those same tactics to turn my hometown into a slaughterhouse. I was surviving, killing scores of people to do it, but what the hell was I living for?

That was how Paige found me. She was in the hallway and happend to look into the open door of my room. The moment she saw the expression on my face she stopped, stepped back, turned her eyes to the floor.

"Paige," I rasped. My face was wet, tears dripping down my cheeks.

"Um. Taylor, I-no. Please excuse me. I'll go." Paige said.

"No, no, don't." I said. "You can come in. I won't hurt you. I'm not like that right now."

"If that's what you want." she said quietly.

"Yes, please. Come in. And close the door behind you. Please."

Paige closed the door quietly. She didn't raise her eyes to meet mine, and stayed near the door where she could leave at a moment's notice. She thought I was in one of my bad moods, ready to snap at any moment.

"I...I'm not...something's wrong and I don't, I dont know..." I stopped trying to talk and just stared at her, shaking my head helplessly. I couldn't articulate what was wrong, what I wanted, why I needed her with me right now...

The home video on my laptop continued. Two parents in a kitchen, playing with their baby girl. I watched in a daze, trying to pull my thoughts together.

Paige approached to stand beside me, joined me in watching the video.

"Is it something to do with..." she stopped. She didn't know what would set me off.

"Go ahead. Please."

"Something to do with your family?"

"I...yes. No. I don't know. I..." I shook my head to clear it. "No. No. The problem is obvious. It's the balance of power. Need to get it right. I'm getting too tired, can't keep this up anymore, but if I get it wrong I'll get us all killed."

"I don't understand, Taylor."

"You've seen my power. You know I'm not just one person, or two, I'm _many_ people. And most of them are completely useless, they'll get me killed or worse in a matter of days.

"You saw me when I was a self-loathing bag of tears, convincing myself I deserved to be shipped off to the Birdcage. If I let myself get like that again I'll do something stupid, make a mistake, maybe even kill myself or turn myself in. You saw me when I was a hair-trigger nutcase, coming an inch from burning you because you were too slow to follow my orders. If I let myself get like that again I'll get into a stupid fight in public, get the heroes called in to kill us all. And you're...you're seeing me now, a nervous wreck trapped between the extremes.

"I'm broken, Paige, I can't survive on my own. I need help. Friends to take care of me. I don't know if you consider yourselves my friends, but...allies, maybe? I need Lung to watch over me, to catch me when I get too emotional and cover me with flames to make the tears go away. But...I need you too. You keep avoiding me when I'm using my power but that's when I need you the most, when I need you to whisper in my ear and calm me down when I get out of control."

Paige's expression slowly changed into a mask of dread.

"Please, Paige. You need to help me keep my balance. I'm not asking for much. I saved you from the Birdcage for this."

"I...I try, Taylor, but it's hard. I've seen what you do to people when you're like that. You look at me with dead eyes like I'm nothing. Like if I say a single word you don't like you'd rather burn me than tell me what I did wrong."

"Yeah. That's why you need to stick with me, to stop me before I get that far gone. "

"I know, I know. It's hard."

"Please, Paige, I'm afraid. I'm shaking here. Please don't let me die. I...I know I'm asking a lot. I'm asking you to be my friend, and I haven't been a very good friend to you. But don't you want me to live? I'm...I'm useful, aren't I? I'm good in a fight. I make good plans. I saved you, Paige, I saved you from the fucking Birdcage! You owe me your _life_, can't you do this _one thing_ for me?"

Paige backed away from me, eyes wide. "Taylor, please! I can't, you told me not to sing to you! You made me promise!"

...Oh. Right. I spoke softly, trying to reassure her. "I wasn't going to burn you just now. I was just a little upset. Um. Anyway, I remember now. I told you I'd kill you if you sang to me, didn't I. Back in the van. Damn."

Was there any way I could fix this? ...No. The more I thought of it, the more I realized that my plan for Paige had been doomed from the start. No matter what I promised her now, she had no guarantee that I would follow through when I was in the full grips of my power. Hell, _I_ had no guarantee on what I would do when I was like that. If she saw me getting out of control and started singing to me, and if I was too far gone and decided to burn her - then that was it. I'd burn her. Even Lung couldn't protect her from me.

That meant I had to find another solution, had to find it soon. I could have Paige sing for me _now_, when I could promise it was safe. Maybe...maybe she could use her power to _fix_ me in my current mental state, halfway between the extremes. Or...or I could talk to Lung, ask him to...to keep a watch on me and...and...

God, I was so tired.

"Can I ask you for a favor, Paige? I won't ask you to break your promise."

"Okay..."

"I made you promise not to sing to bring back my emotions. But you can still sing to give me something else. Can you give me peace?"

"Peace? I don't know what you mean."

"I haven't slept in three days. I haven't _let_ myself sleep, because I'm afraid of what I'll do when I wake up. You saw what happened last time. I can't let that happen again."

"Taylor, I don't know what you mean. I've never seen you go to sleep."

"In the containment van. In my PRT cell I used my power to get rid of my emotions, to get the focus I needed to plan my escape. Then they dosed me with sedatives to put me in the van, and you saw what happened when I woke up. I went back to my old self, with so much shame and self-hatred that I gave up on the plan, gave up on surviving, just sat there like a passive lump and let the PRT do whatever they wanted to me. If it hadn't been for Lung provoking me, feeding my power and bringing back my will to live, we'd all be in the Birdcage right now.

"I need to sleep again soon. I can't keep putting it off. But I'm afraid that when I wake up I'll go all the way back to my old self, and I don't know what the hell I'll do. Last time I almost got myself put in the Birdcage, what next? What if I wake up in bed and I think I'm safe at home in Brockton Bay, going to go downstairs to have breakfast with Dad, and then I see where I am and I, I..."

I swallowed, felt tears on my cheeks.

"...I can feel it, it's all coming back to me now, where I am, what I've done. If it comes all the way back then I, I might not survive. I might decide I deserve to die, slit my wrists, electrocute myself in the bathtub. I might, might even _betray_ you, call the police and tell them where to find us. I'm feeling it right now, that sick self-hatred seeping into my mind, and I can't stop thinking about it. Every time I lie down in bed this happens to me, I can't sleep because I just get so afraid that I'll never wake up.

"Can you help me, Paige? Can you sing for me? Sing me a lullaby, sing me to sleep, make my feelings fade away so I can finally rest?"

Paige was silent for a moment, studying my face. Then she nodded. "Okay. I'll sing for you, Taylor, if you'll let me. If you promise me you won't...do anything rash, later."

I managed a small smile. "I promise."

"Okay. You should take care of anything you need to do, now. Once I start, you won't be able to move until morning."

I set aside my laptop, still playing its videos of a family's daily life, and crawled under the bed sheets. Paige sat on the side of the bed and closed her eyes. Her demeanor gradually changed, the anxiety that had lined her face for the last three days slowly slipping away. Then she began to sing. A lullaby, a gentle stream of soothing, soft words, one that my mother used long ago to sing me to sleep when I was a child...

...  
...

As she sang my racing thoughts slowed down, went still. They left behind a collage of afterimages, faint impressions passing through my awareness as they faded away. The prison, the car chase, the forest fire, the dying candle flames beside me, the faint heat from Lung's presence in the living room, my home in Brockton Bay, my dad, my mom...

...  
...

When she finished her song Paige opened her eyes and studied me, silently contemplating my face. After a minute she sighed and spoke.

"You're so young. When you use your power you're terrifying. I can't meet your eyes. But seeing you like this...you're just a kid."

Paige adjusted my sheets, reached out a hand and brushed my cheek.

"Sleep well, Taylor. Sleep now."

I slept.


End file.
